I watch her sleeping face and think, like this, how ridiculously easy it is to see the little kid from those old photos. Not a care in the world. But then I’m back at Belsize Park, where I’ve been all night in my head, remembering the stuff Dom and George told me about themselves and George’s mum, and the stuff I didn’t tell them about me. And my mum.

I think about that moment when my Uncle Danny shook my hand and just for that second it was like everything in my brain went high definition. Because even though he was as drunk as anyone I’ve ever seen, when I felt his big hand wrap around mine all I could think was, Holy shit. Maybe I’ve actually come to the right place.

I watch my mother’s sleeping face and think about drowning. She opens her eyes and the kid in the photos scarpers.

‘Hey, you,’ I say.

9

Danny

The morning after Wolfie came, with the sun blasting through the small cracked window of the shed as I struggled my way out of sleep, I wondered if Dr Spooner’s dream manifestations had actually worked, and I’d been picked up by a northerly wind and transported down to Bondi Beach in the night. It felt like I could sizzle an egg on my cheek, and when I rolled over and tried to blink myself properly awake, only one of my eyes did what it was told.

I was concentrating on trying to unglue the other one when the pipes underneath the sink let out a sharp crack, followed by an elongated groan as someone in the house turned on a tap. I shot up in bed, banging my head on the wall behind me on the way. No matter how often it happened, it still always caught me by surprise, but there was no way I was going to try to work out the mysteries of that plumbing ever again. Not after last time. Dom and George had not been best pleased having to go thirty-six hours without running water in the house while the tap over my sink flowed like the Zambezi.

I put my hand up to feel the bump that was already forming on the back of my head, and a flurry of cake crumbs dropped out of my hair on to the duvet. That I was still fully dressed in the clothes and shoes I’d put on almost twenty-four hours before was no real novelty, but as the events of the previous evening began to parachute in, I remembered that a bit of cake in my bed and an egg on my head might soon be the least of my worries.

Even putting aside my drunkenness and the (yes, thank you, Dom) surprise of it all, I knew I should have handled things better with Wolfie. But the times I do what I should, or even what I could, after a shedload of beer are about as rare as a yak milk cappuccino. Because of course I should have asked Wolfie straight up if she knew what she was dealing with. More precisely, whether she was aware of the reason her uncle hadn’t ever popped up at any family Christmases with a sack of presents and a bottle of sherry. I would have thought she’d have serious doubts about the wisdom of tracking me down if she had even the slightest idea of the truth.